My Very Own Emotional Rollercoaster

Taking Back Control

I’ve spent too much of my life depressed. I hate it. It fuckin’ sucks.

It’s a two steps forward, one step back kinda situation over here in Kevin Land. But I’ve been able to raise my self esteem quite significantly by taking my life seriously, breaking bad habits, meeting my goals, becoming my own parent, therapist & friend, eating my morning bald eagle eggs and panda bacon. You know, pretty much what you’d expect.

People who’ve known me for the last 5 years or so, or even the last 2 can attest to the caterpillar to butterfly transformation I’ve undergone. I wasn’t always this charming and sexy ;)

As I’ve gained self esteem, observing myself in the process, I’ve noticed a pattern that was driving me crazy. I want to tell you about it and remind you for the thousandth time that we gotta live in reality. I’ll keep banging that drum because it’s important for two thousand reasons.

The Mania / Depression Wave

Entering therapy was easily one of the most significant events in my life, and it was the start of the current Kevin epoch. This is when I decided to regain control over my life.

I didn’t have my emotions. Instead, they had me. I’d go through phases of incredible inspiration followed by an unshakable dysthymia. After some time, I’d feel inspired again, only to fall,… again.

I made you a drawing of it :)

The Y-axis is how good I felt and the X-axis is time. This is a highly scientific visualization of what was occurring for me.

I’m not a manic depressive, but I like the term “mania” to describe being out of touch with reality. The general idea being that I would feel depressed for a while and then get out of that funk when I became excited about a bunch of possibilities that could make my life totally awesome. :D

Based on how good I felt, you’d almost get the sense that I actually achieved something, but this almost never translated into achievement. I’d become infatuated with a new persona I could adopt, like the indie rockstar or the game developer. I’d dream up an intoxicating fantasy that I wouldn’t want to let go of.

After a whole lot of nothing and not letting go of this false image I had of myself, I’d become increasingly frustrated with my life. “Why can’t reality just accept that I’m a rockstar!? I played like 4 hours of ukulele last weekend. Does that count for nothing?!”

Eventually that frustration sent me crashing back down into depression, just so the cycle could start all over again. I wrote about how managing expectations helps prevent depression here (reason to live in reality #956).

Before I connected with reality I tried to solve this problem another way: with cynicism.

The Cynical Baseline

When I brought up positive things happening in my life to my therapist, she would express enthusiasm. This was an amusing contrast to my completely matter of fact, expressionless delivery of good news.

I became afraid of getting my hopes up. (Disappointment is pretty goddam disappointing). I wanted to prevent that, so I would temper any enthusiasm I felt with preemptive cynicism. Every good thing was just a bad thing waiting to happen, to my mind.

My therapist was all like “well, in the meantime, maybe you could be happy about your good fortune”. It helped me see what I was doing and why I was doing it, which helped me give myself permission to take pleasure in my life.

Here’s what I was trying to do:

To be fair to myself, it was less crazy making than crashing into depression and losing trust in my ability to perceive reality.

I should stress – cynicism is not realism. That’s just what the cynics want you to believe. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you!

Cynicism is scar tissue. A cynical person is a person who’s had high expectations, only to have them crushed under the weight of crippling disappointment. They are in pain. And at one point, they were optimists.

It’s well worth the effort to reclaim that optimism. And really, all things considered, we live in pretty amazing times with a lot of possibility. You can literally make a living making response videos to other videos on Youtube, if you are entertaining enough.

Even with all of the suffering in the world, life is infinitely better today than just two hundred years ago. The fact that we have the time to feel depressed is an achievement in and of itself. It certainly beats barely surviving in a time of bone depleting scarcity.

Reality is actually a pretty great place at times.

The Baseline That Reality Made

A person with high self esteem isn’t constantly happy, any more than we are constantly healthy. Sometimes we get sick, other times we experience loss.

For a long time I just assumed that lasting happiness meant being without fear or sadness or anger. I pictured a zen Kevin with powers of perfect perspective, able to see the big picture at all times. But alas, sometimes the picture is small, because that’s where all the details are hiding.

Instead of resisting my negative emotions out of fear that it would mean I am failing in some way, I trust my emotions and have them, rather than them having me. I simply let my emotions be what they are. If I have expectations that don’t line up with reality, I readjust my expectations. Simply put, I welcome reality in whatever form it takes.

The result, for me, has been surprisingly stable. Instead of the cynical baseline allowing me to rest somewhere above depression but far away from mania, I experience lots of different emotions that pretty quickly return to an emotional baseline significantly above the artificially low cynical baseline.

Here’s the final chart:

As you can see, we’ve scienced it up and get a bigger picture.

That high point in the middle must have been when a girl I like said “yes” to a date. Then that dip was probably when a new version of the software I developed didn’t perform as well as I’d hoped. (No actual data was used in the making of this chart; I’m just being silly).

Reality is the only place I want to be, but then why would I ever escape it?

Neglect and Indifference

The answer to the question I just asked is too big to answer completely, but I thought I’d take part of a stab anyway. (This is the part where I stop joking around).

It’s weird for me to watch other people parent. It makes me see just how painful my own childhood was. It was all I knew, so I thought it was normal. I thought it was weird to see parents actually talk to their kids, or ask them about their day, their preferences, the inner workings of their minds. I thought that the way you handle sadness and fear was to pretend like it didn’t exist, and if it felt too great to suppress, act it out aggressively, and then never talk about it again.

There is something that’s a little horrifying about these kinds of fragile relationships, where everyone is totally disconnected and numb to their own feelings. You can’t learn how to manage your own emotions when you don’t even acknowledge them. As I got older and more physically strong, I also became more weak in a way, like my emotional tolerance muscles were atrophying. Even fear and sadness in small doses were overwhelming at times, which prompted me to suppress them even more.

The stoic who denies his feelings is actually incredibly fragile. My own father studied the stoic philosophers in search of strength, but his rage only festered and he lost control over his own life and happiness. He is an incredibly sad man, and my mother a sad woman. They hate each other, but they share the worst qualities. And neither tried very hard to meet me in reality.

For most of my life, I felt largely invisible. I couldn’t see myself. I had no idea if I was attractive or ugly, wise or naive, valuable to the people in my life, talented or not, etc. I was surrounded by codependents and was one myself. The idea that any of us would give each other an honest evaluation meant possibly exposing ourselves to the same.

If I ever requested honest feedback, I’d get some quick assurance that I wasn’t ugly or anything else I was insecure about. I never believed anyone, either due to their uncomfortable insincerity or my own lack of self esteem, which told me that I couldn’t possibly be attractive, so they must be fools, or they must be lying.

I suspect that if, as a child, I had been taught how to manage my frustration, to respect my emotions, developed a growing awareness of my own mind in response to the curiosity of the important people in my life, then I could have spared myself a good deal of the numbness, frustration, depression and confusion which plagued much of my adult life.

My parents’ own avoidances, neuroses and cowardice became my own. Instead of being parented, I was essentially on my own to get my emotional needs met. These things don’t come automatically, and I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I was a small child and I kept my emotional wounds secret, so that I wouldn’t burden my parents with something they couldn’t help me with anyway.

My parents got a few things right. They never hit me or yelled at me, that I can remember, and that’s not insignificant. But when it came to having a strong bond and being an emotional anchor for me, they fucked up pretty royally.

I’d feel more sympathy for my parents if I hadn’t proved that it’s possible, through my own example and hard work, to reverse this cursed fate and take back control of my life. “What one man can do, another man can do” as the philosopher says. They know their lives are totally fucked up and unhappy, and they know there is such a thing as therapy. They even know that their own mystical new age escapism is bullshit because they know exactly what questions to avoid.

I’d feel more sympathy for them if they hadn’t made their own cowardice my problem and a problem for my siblings. They couldn’t be bothered to get the fuck over their own insecurities around their shitty parenting, and even worse, they asked their children to manage that insecurity for them. It’s like being punched in the face, and then having to make your attacker feel better about having punched you in the face because they feel bad.

Reality is great, and sometimes it’s a bitch. But so what? Denying reality doesn’t make it any less of a bitch, it only makes it worse for everyone around you.

Call to Action

If you don’t experience control over your life, chase that motherfucker down and wrestle it to the ground and make it work for you. Never mind the fragile little people who will be made to feel uncomfortable if you take back control – the people who barely exist anyway.

At some point you stop having valid excuses. Don’t let your own inaction poison the people around you. If you have children – if you have love, do it for them. If you don’t have children or a love relationship, do it so that you can be someone who high self esteem people can love and admire.

Be the one to reverse this trend in your own bloodline and bring sanity to the world. Don’t waste away, malnourished from a deficiency of self love. Your world desperately needs a hero, and I know you can do it! :)

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